"Do I? Ifni! I wish we were home doing that now! What's happening? Are you having equipment trouble on the bridge? I'm getting no visual, and there's a lot of static. I thought you were taken off comm duty. And why the Trinary?"
Toshio's lips pursed as he repeated the message to himself silently. "…soft High Patron." There were few humans given titles like that by fins. Only one candidate was here on the island right now.
"You want to talk to Gillian?"
Toshio blinked, then he said, "I'll get her right away, Akki! You hold on!"
He turned and ran into the forest, calling Gillian's name at the top of his lungs.
43 ::: Akki
The monofilament cable was almost invisible against the rubble and ooze of the sea floor. Even in the light from Akki's harness lamp, it barely reflected a spiderweb's glimmer here and there amidst the rock and sediments atop this jagged ridgeline.
The cable had been designed to be hard to detect; it was the only certain way Streaker could communicate with her two outlying work parties without giving away her location. Akki had been forced to search for over an hour, using the best instruments at his disposal and knowing where to look, before finding the line to the island. By the time he had clipped his neural tap into the line, more than half of the oxygen in his breather was gone.
A lot of time had been spent just getting away from the ship. And Akki wasn't even sure his departure had gone unnoticed. The taciturn electrician's mate in charge of the equipment locker shouldn't have questioned orders when Akki asked for breathing gear. Another fin, an off-duty engine room rating, had followed him from a distance after he had left the equipment locker, and Akki had to dodge through the outlock to shake the Stenos off his tail.
In less than two days a subtle change had come over the crew of Streaker. A new alignment of power had been set up. Crew members who had formerly been of little influence now pushed their way to the front of the food lines and adopted dominant body postures, while others went about their duties with eyes downcast and flukes drooping.
Rank and official position had little to do with it. Such things had always been informal aboard Streaker anyway. Dolphins were more apt to pay attention to subtle shifts in dominance than to formal authority.
Now even racism seemed to be a factor. A disproportionate number of the new figures of authority were of the Stenos sub-breed.
It amounted to an informal coup. Officially, Takkata-Jim was acting on behalf of the unconscious Creideiki until a ship's council could be convened. But Streaker's water had the taste of a herd with a new dominant male. Those close to the old bull were on the out, and the cronies of the new swam in the vanguard.
Akki found it all quite illogical and a bit disgusting. It brought home to him that even the highly selected fen of Streaker's crew could submit to ancient patterns of behavior under stress. He now saw what the Galactics meant when they said that three hundred years of uplift was too short a time for a race to be ready for starships.
It was a rude realization. It made Akki feel more like a client than he ever had in the mixed, egalitarian colony of Calafia.
The discovery did help in one way, though. It gave him a primitive satisfaction in his act of mutiny. Legalistically, he was committing a serious crime, abandoning the ship to make contact with Gillian Baskin against specific orders from the acting captain.
But now Akki felt he knew the truth; he was a member of a crew of imitation spacemen. There was no way, short of Creideiki miraculously recovering, that they were going to get out of this mess without intervention by their patrons.
He discounted the value of Ignacio Metz — or Emerson D'Anite or even Toshio, for that matter. He agreed with Makanee that their only hope lay in Dr. Baskin or Mr. Orley coming home.
By now he had come to accept that Orley was lost. The rest of the crew believed this, and it was one more reason morale had gone to hell since Creideiki's accident.
The comm line quietly sent a carrier tone directly to his stato-acoustic nerve, as Akki waited impatiently for Toshio to return with Gillian. The line was not being used for anything else, now that Charles Dart had signed off, but every second that passed increased the chance that the present comm operator aboard the ship would detect the resonance of his tap. Akki had set it up so they couldn't pick up his conversation with Toshio, but even a dullard CommSec fin couldn't miss the side effects, in time.
Where are they? he wondered. Surely they know I only have so much air? And this metal-rich water makes my skin itch!
Akki breathed slowly for calm. A teaching rhyme of Keneenk ran through his mind.
Past, future and present were among the hardest ideas to express explicitly in Trinary The rhyme was meant to teach causation as the human patrons, and most other sophonts, saw it, while keeping essential faith with the cetacean view of life.
It all seemed so simple to Akki. At times he wondered why some of these dolphins of Earth had so much trouble with such ideas. One thought, one imagined actions and their consequences, considered how the — different results would taste and feel, then one acted! If the future was unclear, one did the best one could, and hoped.
It was how humans had muddled through during the ages of their horrible, orphaned ignorance. Akki saw no reason why it should be so hard for his people, especially when they were being shown the way.
"Akki? Toshio here. Gillian's coming. She had to break away from something important, so I ran ahead. Are you all right?"
Akki sighed.
"Hang on," Toshio called, interrupting the rhyme. Akki grimaced. Toshio never would develop a sense of style.
"Here's Gillian," Toshio finished. "Take care of yourself, Akki!"
The line crackled with static.
"Akki?"
It was the voice of Gillian Baskin, made tinny by the weak connection, but almost infinitely gratifying to hear.
"What is it, dear? Can you tell me what's going on on the ship? Why won't Creideiki talk to me?"
That wasn't what Akki had thought she would ask first. For some reason he had expected her main concern to be Tom Orley. Well, he wasn't about to bring the subject up if she didn't.